[athst]

The fact is that, in a lot of cases, the news that the NYT creates is not commoditized. Often, they are one of the only, if not the only, organization covering a particular story. The problem is that now there are a lot of derivative news sites like HuffPo that leech off of their original content.

So, yeah, there are probably a lot of other places that you could get the same story, but in a lot of cases those other stories are just piggybacking on the NYT's original reporting.

Here's an example from a while ago: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/12/nytimes2...